One survivor of the Hell Ship recalled that three to eight prisoners died each day, while the American envoy to the peace accords, Henry Laurens, wrote that in 1778 the ship was claiming five or six lives a day. In a letter to Admiral Digby, General Washington also wrote that the losses on the Jersey were devastatingly high and often amounted to several prisoners a day. Thomas Dring, while admitting the total loss on the dreaded ship “has never been, and never can be known,” estimates that over 10,000 men died on the Jersey and her three companion ships (Scorpion, Strombolo, and Hunter). He also lamented that their “names have never been known by their countrymen.”
There is little reason to doubt the veracity of the firsthand accounts of the prisoners, including Dring, who went ashore to bury the dead, and Andros, who stood on the upper deck and each day counted the bodies thrown into the “dead boat” for burial ashore. Most of the men who survived imprisonment on the Jersey wrote that somewhere from six to twelve men died on the dreadful ship every day. As such, one way to calculate the total fatality count on the Jersey is to multiply six deaths per day by the number of days (approximately 1,560) it served as a prison ship.* To do so would produce a conservative estimate of roughly 9,360 deaths. A high mark would come from calculating twelve deaths per day for the period the ship functioned as a floating dungeon, which amounts to approximately 18,720 total deaths. The prisoners’ accounts suggested that the number of prisoners who died each day was closer to six when the Jersey was first used as a prison ship, but that the number gradually increased to a dozen a day by 1783 and the end of its service in the war. The total number of men and boys who died on the ship was therefore likely in the middle of the low and high estimates, which would produce a number larger than the 11,500 figure used by historical sources.
Another way to estimate the death toll is to determine how many prisoners were on the Jersey. Reliable accounts suggest that the ship initially held roughly 400 prisoners at a time but was crowded with up to 1,200 by the end of the war. In the 1960s the American historian Jesse Lemisch accessed what remained of the British Admiralty’s records in London. After qualifying his estimate by saying that many of the records were missing and it was impossible to know for sure how many prisoners in total were either on the ship or perished aboard it, Lemisch confirmed that there were at least 7,773 total names on the Jersey’s prisoner logs.* The guards and officers on the Jersey, he concluded, “were far from faithful record keepers.”
Similarly, in 1888, in an effort to raise money to build a memorial to the prison ship martyrs, the Society of Old Brooklynites published a report called A Christmas Reminder. It listed 8,000 names of prisoners who were on Jersey, beginning alphabetically with Garret Aarons and ending with Pierre Zuran. However, they too found that the records of the British War Department were incomplete, “carelessly kept,” and that registers were missing for the other “floating Golgothas,” as they called the prison ships. The society’s report also said that “there is nothing to indicate what became of any of these prisoners, whether they died, escaped, or were exchanged.” So the number was likely far higher, but the society did not list their sources.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in its report “America’s Wars” officially lists the total number of American soldiers and sailors who died in combat during the Revolutionary War at 4,435. Some historians have argued that the number is low. One of them, Howard Peckham, attempted to list the estimated casualty count for all Revolutionary battles and conflicts, and guessed that there were perhaps 6,090 Americans lost in combat, with another 1,084 naval deaths at sea. At least another 10,000 American soldiers succumbed to disease, malnutrition, and the weather.
While these numbers are not overwhelming when compared to losses during the Civil War or Second World War, they are, proportionally, larger than most American wars in terms of the percentage of the overall American population that died. Therefore, because the American population during the Revolutionary War was only 1 percent of what it is today, the death toll aboard the Jersey, if extrapolated to today’s population, would be akin to losing one million prisoners in a war. Taken yet another way, at the time of the Revolutionary War only a handful of cities in America had populations of at least 11,000—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The loss of 11,000 men on the Jersey would be comparable to losing the entire population of a major city today—New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. Likewise, we can make an analogy with the Second World War, where 291,557 Americans died in combat and another 113,842 died in non-combat-related service; the loss on the Jersey would have been equivalent to the deaths of 850,000 men in a single prisoner-of-war camp!
Most of the historical accounts suggest that roughly 11,500 men perished on the Jersey. This number is used by the U.S. Merchant Marines, the History Channel, and the esteemed nineteenth-century war historian Benson Lossing, who nevertheless admitted, “The number of American prisoners buried at the Wallabout is not known.” It is the figure given by Thomas Andros, one of the survivors, who added, “Doubtless no other ship in the British navy ever proved the means of the destruction of so many human beings.”
There are discrepancies in the death toll from the Jersey and there is no reliable independent verification for the numbers. However, if 11,500 boys and men died on the Jersey, then over twice as many Americans were lost on that single, cursed ship than died in combat during the entirety of the long war!
Whichever estimate is most accurate, the Jersey was clearly a death ship. Add in the other prison and hospital ships, and Wallabout Bay was one of the deadliest places and events in American history.
19
Rediscovery
Hail, dark abode! What can with thee compare—
Heat, sickness, famine, death, and stagnant air.
—Philip Freneau, “The British Prison-Ship” (1781)
For several years after the war ended, bleached bones washed ashore in Brooklyn with the tides. As they piled up on the shoreline, residents collected them and buried them in a temporary vault on Hudson Street. Through the early 1800s, human bones and rotted timbers were still visible in the shallows of Wallabout Bay. For local residents, the ghosts of the Jersey were ever-present.
In 1791, a prominent citizen of New York named John Jackson acquired the land by Remsen’s Mill along Wallabout Bay. The following year, Jackson began collecting bones on his property and placing them in caskets. A few years later, Jackson sought to make improvements to the long-abandoned property and sell it to the military for a naval yard. While digging in 1803, he unearthed a large pile of bones that turned out to be a mass grave for the victims of the Jersey. During the construction of the new Brooklyn Navy Yard more bones were discovered nearly every time they put a shovel into the ground. Eventually, thousands of bones were placed in the temporary vault on the property.
Jackson’s discovery rekindled interest in the forgotten tragedy, but it also touched off a political debate about what to do with them. Many Brooklynites wanted the remains buried in a permanent resting place, preferably a nearby churchyard, but Jackson wanted the Tammany Society of New York, a politically influential organization, to take custody of the bones and gravesites. Politics intervened. Bad feelings from the bitter fight between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists during the 1800 election had not dissipated, and with elections looming in 1804 and 1808, both factions were posturing to appear more patriotic. The Federalists were planning to erect a statue of their beloved George Washington, so the Democratic-Republicans (or Republicans) of the Tammany Society, led by one of their congressmen, Samuel L. Mitchell, planned a monument for the prisoners of the Wallabout hulks in order to counter the proposed statue of Washington.*
The leaders of the Tammany Society presented a proposal for a memorial and tomb to Congress on February 10, 1803. But they were unsuccessful. Sadly, the issue faded from the headlines, and the bones continued to be placed in a temporary vault on Hudson Street as they were discovered. With the election of 1808 looming, the prison
ship memorial was again thrust to the fore of the city’s politics. The country was not happy with the trade embargo of 1807 or the sagging economy, both of which occurred under Jefferson’s presidency. So the Republicans were eager to capitalize on the growing anti-British sentiment occasioned by the brutal policy of forcing U.S. sailors to serve on British ships.† The vault, they reasoned, would stoke anti-British and pro-Jefferson passions. It did.
However, the Republicans, favoring a Jeffersonian approach to government and seeking to make inroads with the “common man,” replaced the idea of a grand marble monument with a humble and practical vault. Therefore, in the winter of 1807, leaders of the Tammany Society revisited the issue and appointed a committee headed by Benjamin Romaine to promote the construction of a new vault.* On April 13, 1808, the tomb was finally completed. It sat beside the Navy Yard on land donated by John Jackson near Hudson and Front Streets in Brooklyn. In a ceremony presided over by Jackson, a cornerstone was dedicated. It read, “In the name of the spirits of the departed free—Sacred to the memory of that portion of American Seamen, Soldiers and Citizens, who perished on board the Prison ships of the British at the Wallabout during the Revolution.” Touching words were offered by Joseph D. Fay, a noted attorney who had once worked for Alexander Hamilton.
The simple vault, however, caught the attention of political leaders and the public. On May 26, a “grand” funeral procession marched through New York, passing through Main, Sands, Bridge, York, and Jackson Streets. The grand marshals—Major Aycrigg, whose father was imprisoned in a sugar house, and Captain Alexander Coffin, who survived two sentences aboard the floating dungeons—led the parade to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There they reinterred the bones of the prison ship martyrs. The memorial was carried in a large wagon draped in black ribbons and crape and pulled by four horses. The obelisk was made of black marble and measured eight feet in length, six feet in height, and two feet in width. Four panels surrounded the pedestal, inscribed with the following words:
Front panel: “Americans! Remember the British.”
Right side panel: “Youth of my country! Martyrdom prefer to slavery.”
Left side panel: “Sires of Columbia: Transmit to posterity the cruelties practiced on board the British prison ships.”
Rear panel: “Tyrants dread the gathering storm, while freemen’s obsequies perform.”
Standing next to the wooden frame that covered the vault, Dr. Benjamin Dewitt delivered a moving funeral oration that brought the crowd to tears. Artillery posted on the nearby hill fired a three-volley salute in honor of the event and a military band played solemn music. Standing at attention in a perimeter around the vault were nine soldiers carrying nine different flags, each one symbolizing a different American virtue—patriotism, honor, virtue, patience, fortitude, merit, courage, perseverance, and science. Thirteen bluestone coffins containing the bones of the martyrs were reinterred in the new memorial, which came to be known as the Tomb of the Patriots. An enormous blue flag waved from an eighteen-foot-high pole, with a globe and eagle perched majestically atop it, while thirteen posts—one for each colony—stood guard in front of the memorial. The patriotic occasion, which was attended by 104 veterans of the war as well as clergy, politicians, and “a vast concourse of citizens” believed to number around two thousand, had the desired political effect.
A few years later when the lot was sold, Romaine, who had been a prisoner on one of the wretched ships for seven weeks, purchased it and began restoring the vault. On it, he inscribed the following words: “The portal to the tomb of the 11,500 patriot Prisoners of War, who died in dungeons and pestilential Prison ships in and about the City of New York during the war of our Revolution.” When Romaine died on January 31, 1844, at the age of eighty-two, he was buried alongside the remains of his former crewmates.
Efforts by Romaine before his death to raise funds for the upkeep of the memorial failed. A year later, the U.S. House of Representatives took up a bill to provide $20,000 for upkeep of the site, but it too failed. The $900 donation from Romaine’s will soon ran out and the vault fell into disrepair. Additional efforts to memorialize the martyrs and find a permanent resting place would come and go with little effect, and the tragedy aboard the HMS Jersey would be largely forgotten.
One of those efforts was undertaken by Walt Whitman. The year after Congress rejected funding for the vault, Whitman published a poem and newspaper column about the tragedy at Wallabout Bay. His efforts led to Congress’s purchasing land around the site the following year. The grounds, known as Washington Park, prevented development from encroaching on the site and offered a proper setting for such a sacred memorial.
With the park now established, on May 2, 1855, a group of New Yorkers calling themselves the Martyr Monument Association met “for the purpose of devising and adopting the means necessary to secure the erection of a suitable Monument to the memory of the prisoners who died during the Revolutionary War, on board the Prison-Ships in the Wallabout Bay.” They chose a small hill in Washington Park for the new, permanent site of a memorial. But the effort to build a new monument and reinter the bones would have to wait.
During an impromptu Sunday religious service one day on the upper deck of the Jersey by the spar, a man named Cooper, affectionately nicknamed “the Orator” by the other prisoners, had predicted a day would come when “their bones will be collected… and their rites of sepulture will be performed.” The Orator comforted his fellow prisoners by saying they would be remembered by “a monument erected over the remains of those who have here suffered, the victims of barbarity, and died in vindication of the rights of Man.”
That promise came a step closer to reality in 1867 when the famed landscape architect Calvert Vaux and his protégé Frederick Law Olmsted, the designers of Central Park in New York City, developed a new design for Washington Park and the crypt holding the bones of the prison ship martyrs. Finally, on June 18, 1873, a new vault was opened and the old tomb, which had long before collapsed and was overgrown with vegetation, was emptied. The remains were transported in twenty-two large boxes to be reinterred in the new mausoleum, which cost $6,500. Hundreds of bones were moved to the resting place, but they constituted only a fraction of the total lost on the ships and even just a fraction of those buried in the first vault in 1808—in the intervening years the tomb had been repeatedly vandalized and many of the bones stolen.
The new mausoleum, twenty-five feet by eleven feet, was made of brick and granite and inscribed with the words “Sacred to the Memory of our sailors, soldiers and citizens, who suffered and died on board British prison ships in the Wallabout during the American Revolution.” But the mausoleum and park still lacked a new memorial to replace the original, which had long since been defaced and looted, and reduced to ruin.
Two more decades would pass. Then, in 1896, the Society of Old Brooklynites revived the long-standing effort to build a permanent memorial to the prison ship martyrs on the hill near the mausoleum in Washington Park.* Three years later, more bones were found during construction at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The excavation also turned up two oak coffins, five feet in length, containing hundreds of bones. They were placed in the mausoleum on June 16, 1900. A few years later, crews digging a subway tunnel nearby uncovered more bones. This was simply the latest incident of bones’ being discovered. As the historian Edwin G. Burrows described, local citizens routinely found bones of the prison ship martyrs all along the coastline of Brooklyn, oftentimes “as thick as pumpkins in an autumn cornfield.”
Likewise, in October 1902, a startling discovery occurred. During an expansion of the docks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and renovation of the warship USS Connecticut, work crews found artifacts believed to be from the Jersey. Old timbers, shards of pottery, rusted nails, and other items were collected. The location matched the descriptions of the ship’s final resting place and scholars dated the artifacts uncovered to the late eighteenth century.
The discovery of so many more bones and relics
of the Jersey as the centennial of the opening of the original tomb for the prison ship martyrs neared sparked interest in the memorial project once again. On June 28, 1902, Congress approved a joint resolution to appropriate $100,000 to build a new memorial. New York City offered another $50,000, the state allocated $25,000, and private donors matched that last amount to raise the necessary funds for the memorial. With the funds finally secured, in 1905 the Society of Old Brooklynites and the Daughters of the American Revolution commissioned the famous architectural firm McKim, Mead and White to design a new entrance to the crypt and an appropriate monument to honor those who perished on the prison ships.
The memorial was unveiled on November 14, 1908, at the planned site—a small hill in Fort Greene Park—in time to mark the centennial of the original tomb. A grand parade attended by somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty thousand people marked the solemn occasion. As had been the case a hundred years earlier, the procession wound its way through the city, led by a trumpeter on a black horse, his helmet adorned with black and red feathers. A black silk banner was draped below the trumpet, with these words:
Mortals, avaunt!
11,500
Spirits of the martyred brave
Approach the tomb of Honor, of Glory, of
Virtuous Patriotism.
The result was impressive. The tall Doric column measured 149 feet high and stood majestically upon the hill. It was topped by a bronze lantern sculpted by the noted artist Adolph Alexander Weinman. Below, four eagles were mounted to the corners of granite posts. The base of the monument read simply, “1776 THE PRISON SHIP MARTYRS MONUMENT 1908.”
The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn Page 23
